Empty Soul
by BuryTheHatchet
Summary: Ziva in Somalia, leading to ToC. The rating of M may be slightly high, but I felt that T was too low. Rating for boarding on explicit mentions of violence, leaning more to the explicit side than the implicit side. If I were to list all the things to be cautious of in this, it would have a similar word count to the story itself. Just do not read if you are sensitive to...anything...


**This is dark. Like, really, really dark. And actually quite a disturbing insight into my mind. It happened after I woke up screaming from a nightmare, and my hands were shaking so much that… the number of errors I had to correct in the morning was…**

Empty Soul

She had lost count of the days after a week. As the weeks morphed into months and time stopped behaving the way it should, with a minute lasting longer than an hour, the different 'truth serums' that were being pumped into her seemed to have worse and worse side effects. And the torture grew more and more painful, more abhorrent the more he enjoyed it.

She refused to scream, or say a word, only opening her mouth to spit at him. But that just made it worse. At some point he had started closing the door whilst he was in the interrogation room, so his men could not snigger at his humiliation behind his back. They still did – she heard them outside her cell, and inside.

After a while she had stopped feeling it, stopped feeling the searing heat of the cigarette butts, stopped feeling the force of his blows, stopped feeling the nausea caused by each one of the chemicals being tested on her. She was numb to everything.

There was nothing he had left to torture her with – she felt no pain, her family had been dead for years, her father was the one who had sent her on the suicide mission, Rivkin was…not important – she had no idea what to believe, who to believe.

Believe Tony, who had killed him, possibly out of jealousy?

Believe her father, who had lied to her so many times before?

Believe Michael, who had been wrapped around her father's little finger, who had lost a fight with _Tony_?

Michael was out of the picture, and the question, along with her father, meaning her only option was Tony. And for some reason she was not angered by that. She had hated Tony in the moment she had seen them both on the floor, both bleeding. It had been Tony that she wanted dead. But then…she had had time to think, and she realised that she did not. How could she? He was Tony. He was her best friend. He was annoying and immature and Tony. Loyal to a fault. He would do anything to protect his friends, and he had proved that.

He had killed Michael.

And she was not angry with him any more.

His was the only voice she wanted to hear anymore. It was the only voice she heard when delirium set in and she started talking to him to keep her company. She would never talk about anything important – it would just be nonsense, asking him what he had been doing, telling him about her captors, asking him to tell her about the latest movies he had seen.

There had been a moment in which she had thought she was pregnant – the night that her father had told her she would be completing Rivkin's mission. And then she had been so busy preparing to leave, and then the mission itself, she had never even bought a test. If she had been, she was not anymore. There had been so much blood the first time she woke up in her cell, her clothes saturated in the sticky substance – how much of it was her own though, she did not know. They had given her clean-ish clothes, relative to what she had slept in the first night, after her interrogator refused to work with her if she was attracting the flies. One of his men had taken especial pleasure in cleaning her body, roughly scrubbing the blood from her skin where it had leached through the fabric of her clothes and seeped from her wounds until she was raw, her wrists and ankles bound to the edges of the rusty tub filled with freezing water – unable to fight back, unable to wipe the filthy leer off his face.

Though she knew it was wrong, she was almost relieved to think that if she had been pregnant, she was certainly not now. There was no way a foetus could have survived after the months of torture she had been through – the blows she had received to her stomach alone enough to have ended any potential life, not considering the abstract cocktails and concoctions flowing through her blood stream and all of her captor's techniques, made worse by the enjoyment he seemed to gain from them. Her body, too, was working against any possible child, starvation and blood-loss draining her already small body, weakening it, degrading the once strong, toned form into something much more brittle. And she was relieved, because then she would never have to consider how she would feel towards the child of a man who was only following her father's orders. Would she see the child's father every time she looked at it? Would she still be able to love it? Would she still have the capability to love? She had no idea, and so she put it out of her mind, forgetting about it. Why dwell on something that did not matter anymore?

By this point, she was empty. The world had nothing left for her. She had no hope anymore. She had lost everything. The only person she cared about had no idea anything was even wrong, he had probably moved on. She had not even said goodbye to him. The last time she had seen him, she had pressed a gun to his chest. She saw no point in her continued existence. So she waited it out. Tormenting her tormentor until he snapped, until he decided enough was enough, until he decided that he would never get anywhere with her – no matter how many times he tried to break her. That day was still to come, and the near constant infliction of pain seemed only to cease for the few moments she was left to shut her eyes until the next round of pain was brought forth in the form of calloused hands pulling at her flesh, the coarse material of the t-shirt and cargo pants that were changed weekly when the smell got so bad that even their vulgar hands could not bring themselves to touch her. And those were the days she dreaded most, even in her empty state, because everyone wanted at her when she was clean – how ever relative the term was. She was again a fresh tableau to mar.

A commotion outside the four walls of her cell ended the continuous pain, though. Her torturer found another toy to play with, the rest of the men stopped guarding her cell, leaving the two youngest outside and in charge. The pain, although not constant, did not stop altogether. The younger of the two, barely sixteen years old, felt that it was his time to prove himself. His eyes were cold and hard, full of hatred and disgust and confidence. Confidence in himself, for she put up no fight, all energy taken from her, and her body was too weak to struggle against even his juvenile form, already growing solid with muscle built from intensive training. And as she stared up into his eyes she wondered where the world had gone wrong, wondered how such a young face could be proud of himself for doing what he was. A muscle twitched in his face as her eyes stayed on his and his hand slammed down on them, to block her dull, dead stare from his mind. And when he was done he spat at her, kicked dirt in her face and swore before closing the door behind himself, laughing at the boy waiting outside.

As the bolt slid across once more and the heavy door opened, closing with a bang, she wished she could find it within herself to shed a tear, to turn away from the approaching figure. But she could not. She was dead inside and could not care what he did to her anymore. His slow, quiet footsteps moved away for a moment, returning seconds later. Fabric brushing over her feet made her let her head loll to the side, allowing her to see what the young man was doing. He was approximately eighteen, wiry and gangly, his big eyes solemn as he crouched by her legs and tugged the trousers that had been discarded across the other side of the room over her scarred skin, focusing on the fastening before looking up at her. _I apologise for my brother. Our mother and sister were killed. He hates women._ She stared unblinking. _You understand, yes?_ To the language or the reason, she did not know, but the slow blink seemed to portray the affirmative to him, and his mouth tweaked upwards slightly before settling into its firm line again. He touched a cut on her forehead and pulled his fingers away, sighing at the blood. _I wanted to be a doctor. I was to go to school._ He propped her up against the wall and placed a tin dish with a stale chunk of bread on it, along with a cup of water. _It is all I could get._ He said as he sat down in front of her, cross-legged, nodding to it.

She hesitantly reached out for the bread, immediately retracting her arm when the door boomed open and her torturer stood in the doorway, more irate than usual. He kicked the plate away and hauled her up by her hair. "I do not think I shall shed a tear when you leave us." He said in his broken English, a smirk on his face. And then she knew she was not completely dead, because if she were she would not be able to feel the twinge of relief at the thought of him ending it all. The hood was jammed over her head and he dragged her, pausing slightly as she heard the sickening crunch of the bones of the boy who had shown her a sliver of mercy.

 **Sorry. At least we know what happens when she is sat in front of Tony.**

 **For my reference: 52nd NCIS fic.**


End file.
